Erica Glasier: Oversocialized! Social media & interactive futurism from sunny Winnipeg

Photo by jefield | Flickr Creative Commons | CC BY 2.0

I know, I know, I’m an enigma wrapped in a riddle. On the one hand I love social networking, work in social media marketing, and check in with Foursquare. On the other, I’m righteously indignant that Facebook insists on publishing my fan pages and friends list to make a buck. I think geolocation is so cool, but I’m worried that we’re cutting down the privacy forest faster than the hairy-legged tree planters of social convention can reseed it. If there’s no trees, we’ll all be able to see each other going to the bathroom.

Wired experimented with it, arming one poor writer with an armada of GPS-enabled tech & watching his psychological breakdown. Mashable terrified us with it, making us consider the looming specter of personal injury & property loss. Location sharing is the big cool thing for 2010. But is location awareness just TMI for the careful constrains of society as we know it?

It’s weird on a fundamental level to think that one day soon you might be found, contacted, hassled, marketed to, located at any time. People like time off. People need to pull the covers over their head at some point during the day and say “enough”. Blackberries, cell phones, the ominous eye of the Google Streetview car, all intrude on our personal domain and connect us, however inconveniently at times, to other people.

It’s not just that people know what movies you like and what pages you’re a fan of. The new location-aware web will let them know where you literally are. How to get to you at all times.

This is more than a breach of a general sense of decorous privacy. This is an encroachment into our most personal resource, our time. Our attention, our thoughts, are diverted, captured, required by others. A rising sense of panic accompanies the sensation you might never be alone again. Continue reading

Don your tinfoil helmets, oh friended ones, and wrap your conspiracy theories around this…

Facebook celebrated their 6th birthday by announcing their network now boasts 400 million souls, or almost 6% of the earth’s population. Facebook’s birthday is February 4th…02/04..2+4 is—gulp—6! If you’re slow with math, that’s three big fat 6’s in a row.

Oh my. Let’s bust out the Bible and see what it has to say about this.

Daniel 8:23-25
And through his policy also he shall cause deceit to prosper in his hand…

Could that refer to a privacy policy, possibly the one that roped in millions of users who never dreamed their friend lists would one day be made public? A policy that, once we had unstoppable group inertia* due to our elderly parents making likely their only leap to social networking, then changed to make way for better search results and advertising revenues? Gosh, I hope not.

Daniel 7:24-27
And he shall speak great words against the most High…and think to change times and laws.

Ok, if “he” is Mark Zuckerberg and “the most High” is the American Constitution (specifically, the Fourth Amendment, guarding against “unreasonable searches” and protecting “a reasonable expectation of privacy”) and the “times” he’d  like to change are the famous social norms regarding privacy, am I painting a scary enough picture for you yet? But wait…

Revelation 13:3-18
And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the Mark.

Gartner Research predicts that by 2012—the end of the freaking Mayan calendar—”Facebook will lead the pack in developing the distributed, interoperable social Web through Facebook Connect and similar mechanisms. The interoperability will be critical to survival of other social networks. Other social networks (including Twitter) will continue to develop…However, they will all revolve around Facebook.” In other words Facebook will control the universe. The universe may or may not include your disposable income.

Alrighty then. Nothing to panic about. We knew the end times were probably upon us anyway. Let him that hath understanding reckon the number of the beast. Hopefully this newfound prophetic clarity is a balm for those souls chapped about controlling their own information. Let it help you accept your fate with grace. I, for one, welcome our new Social Overlords. Happy Birthday, Facebook!

*Group inertia, or social inertia, is the critical mass attained when everyone you could possibly care about joins a social network, making it tough to leave lest they not follow to “the next big thing”.

Happy Data Privacy Day! A day to relax with family and friends IRL, ponder your digital fingerprint and maybe grill a few Tofurkey sausages.

I’m celebrating Data Privacy Day by staying offline for 24 hours. By “offline”, I mean “not on Facebook”, lest you think I have magic analogue blogging powers. I’m  temporarily defecting from the Big F, as a conscientious objection to its recent bait and switch privacy shenanigans. 24 hours logged out of the world’s most popular social network. I can totally do that. It’s just one little website.

Bleary this morning without my usual cup of decaf (I’m whitening), my mouse moves automatically toward the little blue and white ‘f’ icon in my bookmarks toolbar. Whoa! I think, barely deflecting the click in time. Let’s visit somewhere else. Twitter, perhaps. Twitter use doesn’t strike me as contrary to the spirit of Privacy Day, because despite the fact that it’s actually more publicly searchable, I use it for business and it contains no pictures of me drinking beer.

In support of my Privacy Day tweet, I google* “Data Privacy Day”. The second search result is a Facebook page. Ubiquitous little bugger, that Facebook. I neatly avoid that particular link and go on about my day.

On the road, I wonder how my husband’s convergent media panel at ALL ACCESS: The Digital Incubator is going. Normally I’d Facebook him and see what was shaking. Unlocking my iPhone and heading for the blue square is almost one smooth motion; again I brake and consider my other communication options. I’m not going to phone him, for Pete’s sake. What’s this “messages” icon? Huh. I suppose I could text him. That would actually be faster. Ok. Continue reading

When I was youngster, our house was on a party line with another house across the dusty gravel road. The phone would ring one long for our house, two short for theirs. You answered it if it was for you. You could pick it up at any time and hear—heck, participate in—the conversation of anyone else on the line. Party lines functioned on respect, the honour system, and general good-neighbourliness.

My 8-year-old conversations didn’t have a whole lot of scandalous content such as might impact my future personal brand, but it was a pretty weird situation. That level of personal space invasion would be intolerable today. Within the same household, within the same family we all have our own phones. We hold our communications cards close to our chest. I squint with suspicion when my iPod picks up next door’s wifi network. What kind of person names their network Afrosizzle?

Facebook’s been making some big headlines with their new privacy settings, which include forced exposure of some previously private stats (name, gender, home town, your list of friends). This is ostensibly to appease Canada’s Privacy Commission, although completely removing the ability to hide your associations and personal details can’t be what the ole’ CPC had in mind. Continue reading

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, & the social media that fulfill 'em. Biggie size available on Flickr.

Prologue: Today the New Oxford American Dictionary announced “unfriend” is the 2009 Word of the Year. May it not be a portent of things to come.

Gird yourself for a mortifying tale of techno treachery, friends. Girded?

Ok. In my weekly perusal of Facebook friend’s friends to see who I might be missing being friends with (it’s an orgy of friendship up in here), I came across an ex-coworker who I just adore. We’ve been Facebook friends forever, since that first blissful wave of friendings back in the 1980’s. I thought “I shall be sociable and leave him a wall howdy!”, and scrolled through my friend list to find him. How nice of me, spreading wall sunshine. Scroll scroll. Wait. What the heck. He. Wasn’t. There.

Like dropping your laptop in the bathtub (both personally dismaying and electrically imprudent), a cold shock of disbelief rippled through my being. It appeared, I cringed, that I had been UNFRIENDED.

Ouch.

Now, I could have assimilated the sting of rejection and got on with my life had this been your run of the mill Facebook-friend-you-don’t-really-know-but-they-know-your-other-friend-and-you-met-them-once-outside-Starbucks kind of thing, but this was an actual capital-F Friend. Someone I like! Someone whose positivity and energy shines through their status updates like the glint off a unicorn’s horn! What went so very wrong that he couldn’t at least just “hide” me? Continue reading

Were they out? Lazy? Afraid of H1N1? Trying to encourage H1N1? Photo by Winnipegger & social networking star Ken Bond.

Did anyone else have, like, a really communal experience on Halloween? Not being a religious or family-get-together-heavy holiday (ie one parent at least has to stay home and be on candy duty), a lot of my social network were online. In the days of yore when we lived with our extended families and knew all our neighbours, that might not have mattered so much (and also would have been impossible, because the days of yore didn’t have the internet). But the solo urban existence we’ve got going now can be kind of isolating. Facebook broke down that barrier for me this year. Continue reading

Search engines like Google and Bing are racing to include real-time, “social” search results in their products. This means when you search for something, results connected to your friends will be displayed along with the kind of results you’re used to. The idea is you might find the opinions and resources of your friends more pertinent, or equally interesting, at least, as results from around the general web.

This will probably prove to be pretty neat, ultimately connecting us to our networks a little bit more. You’ll find out who among your friends is a good photographer, or writer, or really opinionated online and maybe where to get good coffee or the scoop on a shoe sale. On a local level that could be quite useful. It’s natural for people to trust peer recommendations – PR giant Edelman determined that “trust in “a person like me” increased from 20% in 2003 to 68% today”. Customer experience may adjust upwards accordingly, because word-of-mouth will be even more quickly and widely disseminated. Social proof—what “everybody’s” doing or saying—is awfully influential stuff, as marketers know. Continue reading